This Polak Pope

Today ad nauseam, every news service, every newspaper is filled with claptrap about Osho's old punch bag the Polack Pope, who died yesterday. True, all religions betray their founders, but Catholicism must be close to being in first place. How can such a medievalism still exist in a so-called modern world? This institution slaughters the inner freedom of men, and women in particular.

This Pope stubbornly and thickheadedly refused to reconsider the Catholic stand against contraception, and in particular condoms, which has created so much human tragedy. This evil willfulness has led and continues to lead to enormous human grief on a gigantic scale — especially in the countries to which he reached out and kissed the earth in his famous visits, like India and Brazil to name but two. The form this takes is whole villages of unparented children roaming the homeless streets of large cities, and in South America leading short and brutal lives. And in these countries too, the plague of aids grows through the roof where if free condoms were available rates could be halved.

The 21st century needs a totally different world view. For example the Pope continued to support the notion of Papal infallibility. An absolutely absurd idea. What makes people human, and good leadership essential is the view that we are all fallible, and the most mature can still have a mistake pointed out by a sage child. This infallibility concept leads directly to Christian fundamentalism which seems so untutored and so uncivilised.

What would Jesus make of all this? (Osho himself realised the problem of religions created in the name of mystics when he said that he had allowed Rajneeshism to flourish in his own lifetime, and then killed it off. Let's hope this is true.) Jesus choose to hang out with prostitutes and working men. He hated the priests of his day, and with good cause. One can only imagine he would be tightening the thongs of his whip again with which he drove the moneychangers out of the temple.

There should be no eulogies to this Pope, and yet this is all we have had today. For a man who patently never looked at himself, at his stubbornness, at his own strange celibacy surrounded by male cardinals, and Polish nuns kept at the distance of the kitchen. And this ridiculous edict of celibacy he placed upon himself and the whole priesthood .... in this day and age. How can a priest lead a congregation without experiencing all that a man or women has within themselves, that every cell in their body strives to enact. Such unnaturalness.

The Polack Pope's long reign simply chained large sections of humanity, particularly in South America, to the middle ages, to aids, to early death, to unparented short lives. And this for hundreds of thousands..

And yet, all day today the litanies and liturgies come..., and come. And then the most sickening, the eulogies... It is not only the Pope, but man himself that needs by some device, by some hook or crook, to wake up. The material conditions of man's life have changed out of recognition since the days Jesus wandered in Judea, and yet the same consciousness, the same mind continues, and in the so-called highest places, and in the most revered religions...

Parmartha (April 3, 05)

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